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Seminole Trail
Seminole trail dreamt in childhood
gliding under Spanish moss running traps in a flat-bottomed pirogue poled through drowned forest
bullfrogs bask, impassive witnesses in mossy camouflage or cryptic jury, crowding a submerged log (like a murder of crows weights anachronistic power lines before Bell's conception I - almost - surface with the shock)
skating iridescent winged ones sipped under in such number I think of falling stars in these periscopic glimpses
of submarine cruising hunters who sound to take a meal a silent thunder in their vortex left behind
a rana-tongue questions air in sudden lightening another meal consumed
black snake swimming its face tips a bone needle quilting sssses in its wake
on the bank, muddy pugmarks say that puma had a snack so yona left her quills here leftovers for my basket
nothing goes to waste
another lightning bolt from nowhere a slender lush-pelt arrow finds its unwary mark frog survivours splash
into ferment: swamp wine blue heron spears a garnish from the drink, surprising doe, who leaps away
my traps were empty but the day, full we return the way we came
- kmf (RedSonja)
Author' Note: Another writer I know recently initiated a conversation about dreams - what we think about them, how they inform our lives and, perhaps, our work. This is in response to her gentle nudge back into dream territory.
It's an account of an actual childhood dream. Not long after, past-life regression became a "hot topic" among the new agers. I reflected a healthy skepticism was warranted, given the competing claims of precourser Napoleons, Josephines, and Jean d'Arcs. And recalled this dream, before I learned of the Seminole in school, and placing "me" firmly among history's unnamed. And titled it after the street on which I later lived.
Of course, it was just a dream.
Tags: poetry writing RedSonja Seminole dream nature
If turkey were not available for Thanksgiving: homage to the subjunctive in food-porn
I give thanks that I will eat a(nother) ramen meal, after all. Foodstamps lack respect for end-of-month holidays, forging a silent brotherhood among the shamed. The cost of a bird with all the trimmings at 30 standardised meals' worth — that's 10 day's squares, for those counting — keeps many chairs from that table. I push away willing, recall a distant childhood when the crops failed — I learnt 100 ways to cook soybeans, that all tasted exactly the same — before I sowed my little fox teeth shed painlessly that endless, scurvy winter one by one, in next spring's hopeful garden of fiddleheads, dandelions greens and ramps — warriors, all — for no fairy's coin nor rescue.
Thankful that the ramen lasted counting my listed blessings: two eggs, four slices of bread a tomato tin, a butternut half an onion, a lonely apple rice and beans and beans and rice dwindling salt, and spice to fend off boredom — the return of growling — between me and the grocer. So I'm grateful I'll not burden the food bank for those who know more need.
I am thankful for a roof warm feet and safety — my hots and a cot — my aged laptop lists and dreams distraction; that the only time I see my breath is when the page is reached. I'll be blessed if the turkeys take a seat at this groaning board to forage below the window again stamping three-pronged barcodes leaving their snow-angels intimidating every feckless cat and sleek, corn-fed black squirrels while my mouth waters.
- kmf (RedSonja)
Author's Note: This was written based on a contest prompt for a short piece on "If there was no turkey at Thanksgiving," (emphasis mine). "If there was" is a grammatical usage based on reality, which I think was not the intention of the contest's sponsor, based on submissions I read. Respondents wrote from a perspective of full bellies and family gatherings. A situation that calls for use of the subjunctive tense, one that is tied to conditionals, to "if," when the outcome is uncertain.
As is the next meal, for far too many in this land of abundance. Indeed, around the world. A case could be made for the subjunctive tense in the case of the uncertainty regarding their next meal. But the turkey? Almost certain to be absent.
No Room At The Table, No Child Hungry, and The Hunger Project are actual, google-able current food projects I didn't have enough room to include, in full, in tags.
Not many still use this verb tense in American English. But I'm exquisitely atuned to it, especially in this case. Thus, this poem (or rant, if you like). Alas, too lengthy to submit.
Tags: poetry writing RedSonja hunger shame Thanksgiving NoRoomAtTheTable
for my father, in ICU It's early morning the day before Thanksgiving. There came about 8 more inches of snow overnight. There's almost an expectant hush, as if something more than dawn lies over the horizon. Although there's no moon, it's luminous. Starlight shimmers off the heavy drifts, painting broad glowing brushstrokes over sleeping yards. Each bared branch and branchlet draped in layers, white satin evening wraps about to slip off shoulders to the floor, if the trees should shrug - all on the verge of melting so that the wet, black boughs knit remaining darkness against the light to give some shape to what we see. Like you beneath your blankets and limned in glow of monitors. The squirrels are dreaming in their nests. No one stirs yet. The whole landscape is clean, untracked, and the quiet is so heavy as to hush the echoes of occasional cars in the wet streets a few blocks over, or the whispered conversations of oxygen and IV drips. One can almost forget the year, that machines and lights are an ordinary part of everyday life, that industry has ever passed this way, that the various tubes going in and out of you are not your branches dreaming of spring buds and waiting to leaf, or that we conspire to continue. It's quite beautiful. And I'm thinking of you. And when you come home, healing, you can know this, too.
- kmf (RedSonja)
Tags: prose poetry writing RedSonja love nature medicine illness healing
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Posted On 10/08/2013 08:01:31
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outside Golden pre-dawn magic sun hid behind mountains I went alone like ice-fishing damp and silent moss-quiet step blending in with trees I saw from a distance a dream, a pulling followed, all days followed the white stallion, bringing up the rear nipping outliers strayed compact and powerful the black lead mare, fronting where she wanted, they should go who knew what way the patchwork follows pintos fog was roiling leaves could not be heard I felt my plain roan way blind, until out of grey materialised, half a foot from face-off they filed right past still, I could hear their breath smelled grasses and felt heat homing in—they had to know that I was there—soft as velvet noses, their unshod hoof-prints marked me then faded back in mist
- kmf (RedSonja)
Tags: poetry writing RedSonja biology change
Black Squirrels
From white squirrels on lawns, a child's handbook full of revolutionary popcorn in sewn-shut pockets: advice from a birthday present, "Steal This Book: or what to wear to a riot." I wore OD and combat boots, all I could afford (the next year brought running shoes lined with newspaper, encased in Wonder, angry at not being allowed to run barefoot - flatout in the 440 or the mile - long-legged, proud) and then ashamed; I hovered casually near the wastebin "Are you gonna eat that?" my greeting on the quad where protests (angry tears) passed through mists of eye-burning fog; shouts out to a campus, the other side of the state where protests left four dead. I'd been there before, snuck into a student dorm armed with Mom's meal-card, shamming, a faux student with a new intro to Chinese calligraphy, and pottery. So I returned. And then . . . 35 hundred empty boot-pairs, several football fields' length crammed in close formation like mute black squirrels, standing at attention but longer, the parade at terminal rest. Brass burrs hinted at shell-casings -- bracketing the other side of my life, less than halfway through another war; still hungry, missing teeth still ready to bite teaching athlete-scholars how to find their voice probing the empty sockets without praising Gawd, nor passing ammo -- along tree-lined streets, no willows.
- kmf (RedSonja)
Author's Note: For any who are curious, the white squirrels (not albino) live in Bowling Green, Ohio. The black squirrels are in Kent. Both are from the same species, Sciurus carolinensis (Eastern Grey Squirrel), but in different colour phases that are genetically heritable and regionally located in Canada and in the US around the Great Lakes. Black squirrels are the unoffical mascots of Kent State University, my alma mater and where I worked, and then returned to teach early in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars (when an exhibit consisting of empty combat boots, one pair for each dead soldier, visited campus) in the town ("Tree City") where I still live; I lived in BG off-campus for a few years near the end of the Vietnam War. So 2 universities, peculiar squirrels and wars came to bracket my life.
Tags: poetry writing RedSonja 'Nam Iraq BGSU KentState
Oh the egg (an elegy for Zipporah)
O the egg -- endless image of the hard-boiled egg, all it was meant to stand for: like the cyclic forever-wedding rings, rebirth and springtime -- kindly expounded by the woman, the rabbi standing in for my husband's mother in the dining room where I missed her most, just off the kitchen, cramped with strangers' gifts at the shivah, her place vacant. But still for me zipping around -- like the small bird she was -- with her father's ghostly shrouds over each mirror: they polished shimmering boxes with their "buts" keeping conversation going, like life actually had to go on. Dutifully peeling, chewing mechanically: only to find the yolk turned to sand, the white to dust, the taste to ash. Salt, so welcome. All gathered as for the best holidays the blessings over wine and bread over her damask I ironed -- happy for something to do -- whisking it away when stained, like a magician, not disturbing the meal. As always, only women moving: prayer in motion, shaking, smoothing. When I must at last be seated: looking over at her grandson -- not yet wifed, much less fathered -- skipping entirely over her son, who in his leaving would have none such comfort offered, scant years later missing his turn at the elder business before the first child, born. And now the harvest moon troubles, again. Swings wide, and low, along the edge, flapping its wings, pedaling furiously, almost too heavy to lift off. Reflected: the egg, the eternal. Or the pearl in the ring she left me. They're all tattooed. So grief comes 'round again: an old friend who dasn't even knock, who knows the door's ajar; there's a place at the table when coming in from the cold.
Racked on my own pinions. The above, haha (not): feathers. A la the bird she was, and also to be pinned down, the state of wivery, I remember how fierce, a crow's laugh emitted when I told her, thinking kindness: we'll take care of him, don't worry -- I knew he'd be lost without her -- trivial as that seemed to be, not her primary focus as she was fledged. She told me. Oh so many things -- how she (her small body) was nourished while she suckled her son, my husband on the backsteps, washed pale with weather with the Depression, in our version of tenements demoted from nurse, to nursemaid: content for 2 beers to fill her for both the babe an' bairn whose mother had rented her. How appropriate, her name: Flo. Amber. Like the drink. How small she was -- Usually blonde in later life barely up to my chin on tiptoe, in heels brazen ly carrying off the centrepieces, least any pineapple, at the reception. We were co-conspirators, happy for gum-blisters to decorate her life: vivid and sarcastic, sheathing in wallpaper what was tough and generous a fab ul ous dancer, a little flirty with a taste for glitter, feathers and more wigs than Imelda's shoes. -- and how great. I could not help but only buried her in embellished dancewear fashionably torn black knit gold, bewigged, bejazzeled (shells nested in schmattes) in a sharp shoebox, in my mind. She flies on each unfettered wind. Why should I be so sad in joy her unlettered dance gave me?
- kmf (RedSonja)
Tags: poetry writing RedSonja life death marriage feminism tradition mother-in-la
This is a revised version of an earlier poem of the same name. I think it works differently, if not better, this way.
metamorphosis
from the mulled rain in the quiet of absence a turtledove flew into my heart bruising its flight against the rib-vaulted narthex waxed liquid jewels spilt over the altarcloth earthquake and tsunami wake to rolling thunder; lava sparks and hisses rushing spiced bloodstreams drumming in ears coohr, coohr rang out in echoes whispers chased into chrysalis pupate, turning . . . a thousand unfurled flames given wing at rain's suggestion a foretaste, smelted on the tongue transmuting a common wine extraordinary
- kmf (RedSonja)
Tags: poetry writing love spiritual cataclysm RedSonja cathedral
You pour yourself into me
If on purpose, or by accident you keep pouring yourself into me like sand with water passing through it you think it’s leaching, leaching, leaching and filtered through while I don’t notice waves and salt, the sweetened dunes
with our respective anchoring grasses and all the loose bits, dampened you've left me dark and granular at risk of temporary castles
with all the atoms clung together we’re stacked in dyads, drifts no longer stuck together and compacted like sugar quartz and rock salt that might, when struck, revert or organised in matrix -- sand to glass -- a new window, crystalled, flows
So I hesitantly wish that supernatent, you’ll float above me for if some signal, word or touch be seeded, I’ll flash beyond where we’d even hoped that we could go and be in salty syrups, quenched
with excess heat in repetition denser yet, and may be anviled made malleable yet unchanging altered by deliberate bonds
so go on pouring, pouring, pouring and know each time, I go whirling drawn into your passing by dancing music of solutions know I drink you at a distance thirsty and craven in your absence yearning to be dissolved
- kmf (RedSonja)
Tags: poetry writing RedSonja L-word Love Inspiration
(four short poems with totally different themes, largely drawn from too much news)
Pandora’s Box had HOPE at the bottom
"Difficult . . ." difficult doesn't begin to encapsulate, or capture: "this." “This:†is unimaginable.
I do my best to stand witness because someone must; to be present: a present, tense as long as it’s unobserved and given anonymously.
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baseball could be biking could be political twitter-sex to cheat to win to scandal someone on the news just said "it was wideblown" meaning widespread and "everyone was doing it" about bad habits long-shadowed by the glare of the miscreants' glamour bigger than the reputations about to be deflated by the chances taken to get them with evidence of shortcuts a head ahead of tests to quantify and level the playing field retroactively
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in the "coolest things on the Internet today" a new study reveals the rich are different from the rest of us in yet another way it's elemental with higher levels of toxic contaminants mercury and arsenic and cesium and thallium Sing along! I hear the tune in my head already and can supply some bouncing balls which like a diet rich in seafood and fresh sushi seems like much more fun
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we who worship at the altar of rational materialism may nonetheless be drawn to embrace all things holy the ultimate open mind including the absence of it altogether without calculating odds
- kmf (RedSonja, aka RunswithScissors)
Tags: poetry writing RedSonja RunswithScissors CurrentEvents NewsAtEleven
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